ABSTRACT
Acknowledgements provide an opportunity for a personalized, non-intellectual self-presentation, for showing that the author is a decent human being, likeable and well liked, conscious of his familial and collegial obligations, modest, and good natured. Acknowledgements with their endless references to the vast amounts of encouragement and support received invite speculations. Scholarly acknowledgements are a ritual, a form of paying lip service to deeply entrenched conventions. If accepted at face value, acknowledgements would compel to thoroughly revise not merely conceptions of the nature of scholarly research and writing, of collegiality, the relationship between authors and editors, the typical marital relations of academics, but human nature itself. Academic intellectuals, like most ordinary mortals, conform, consciously or not, to many social-cultural expectations, norms, and values. Academics, and especially those among them who write and publish books, are highly competitive, often abrasively individualistic, and not always affable "team players". Sociology is a newcomer to the academic world, its recognition as a legitimate discipline.
